Thursday, August 24, 2017

Hundreds of visual surveys in KStars!

With the KStars "Hipster" 2.8.1 release, I introduced Hierarchical Progressive Survey (HiPS) in KStars with three sample catalogs in the optical, infrared, and gamma regions of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Now users can browse from hundreds of online HiPS surveys and can enable them for overlay in KStars. Everything from radio, infrared, optical up to gamma rays is available along with a short description on each survey of interest.

Since these surveys literally take hundreds of gigabytes of storage space, they are downloaded on-demand and stored in a local cache. The disk cache is set by default to consume 1 GB while the RAM cache is set to 300 MB. These settings are now configurable from the HiPS Settings to provide users the flexibility to balance system resources with catalog usage.

By default, overlays utilize nearest neighbor algorithm to map 2D images unto the celestial sphere. Drawing of HiPS overlays can be further improved by enabling Bilinear Interpolation at the expense of increased CPU usage.

These selections shall be available in the next KStars 2.8.2 release coming up soon.